After sending the previous message I started reading this (long) article: The
No-Stats All-Star -
NYTimes.com<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=1&em=&pagewanted=all>.
Here's a key paragraph.
The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their
parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions
among the team's elements. To get at this they need something that
basketball hasn't historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of
its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is
easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and
these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. ("Someone created
the box score," Morey says, "and he should be shot.") How many points a
player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped
his team. Another example: if you want to know a player's value as a
rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood
of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player's
zone.
That's a nice illustration of emergence. It may be subtle, but it's not
magical or mysterious. To create the emergent level of abstraction that the
paragraph refers to, the components have to work together in the right way.
-- Russ
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